Today's music comes from Kati Agócs, a composer on faculty at NEC. Here's "Supernatural Love" performed by Duo Concertante.

Here's some excerpts of reviews of this work:

"The music speaks of loss and redemption...The moods vary throughout
the movements. The first is spectral, wounded, desolate, and cold. The
second is open, warm, rhapsodic and elegant. The third is emancipated,
explosive, monolithic, nattering frantically like music from a charnel
ground. Vivid and strong work."-SHOWTIME.CA, Review of Duo Concertante,
Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, August 2008 (Stanley
Fefferman)

"Melting, ice-like, high-register piano notes open
Kati Agócs's Supernatural Love, followed by beams of sunlight in the
violin. A slowly evolving urgency characterizes the next movement. The
third movement begins with racing chords on the piano, echoed by
counterpoint in the violin. The duet takes on a masculine-feminine
argument, along with simultaneous pizzicato violin with percussive
single-note piano. The overall effect is serene and unworldly, exploring
space with sound in away that seems to evoke the time before the
universe hosted life." -FANFARE MAGAZINE, Review of CD 'Boston Diary' by Ibis Camerata, July/August 2010

"Supernatural Love began with silent, haunting keys accompanied by sad
strokes on the violin. The strokes of sorrow tied together as the piano
chimed. Nancy Dahn used her violin to amplify an inner, womanly call,
gradually slowing the music to a still point. Then, the composer created
a music of “empty sound.” It was an extraordinary moment, showing
emptiness, or loss, as a triumph over sorrow, clearing away an
obstruction to life. There lies the Supernatural Love.” -THE VERNON MORNING SUN, Review of Duo Concertante, North Okanagan Concert Association, Vernon, British Columbia, 20 April 2008

About the composer:

Performed by leading musicians and ensembles across the globe, the
music of Kati Agócs merges lapidary rigor with sensuous lyricism. The
New York Times has characterized her chamber music as "striking", her
orchestral music as "filled with attractive ideas", and her vocal music
as possessing "an almost 19th-century naturalness," while The Boston
Globe has described it as "music of fluidity and austere beauty."
Fanfare magazine hailed her violin-piano duet Supernatural Love as
"serene and unworldly, exploring space with sound in a way that seems to
evoke the time before the universe hosted life." A citation from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters praised the "melody, drama, and
clear design" of her music, citing its "soulful directness" and
"naturalness of dissonance." " Born in 1975 in Windsor, Canada, of
Hungarian and American background, Kati Agócs is a 2013 Composition
Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She been a
full-time member of the composition faculty of the New England
Conservatory in Boston since 2008.

Current commissions include
a work for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players for their Fiftieth
Anniversary; a large-scale work for Boston Modern Orchestra Project
commissioned by the Jebediah Foundation as the final work on a CD of her
orchestral works on the BMOP/Sound label; a work for two sopranos and
percussion, commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts;
Crystallography, commissioned by Standing Wave Ensemble in Vancouver;
and Saint Elizabeth Bells, a cello-cimbalom duet commissioned by cellist
Andre Emelianoff. Her orchestral works have been programmed by many
orchestras across Canada and the U.S. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra
recently gave two performances of Shenanigan, commissioned in 2011 by
James Sommerville for the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra in Hamilton,
Ontario. The Toronto Star called Shenanigan "a whirl of symphonic
fun....a burst of party energy", while Musical Toronto called it "a fun,
accessible piece that shows off a symphony orchestra's full breadth,
and deserves to be heard again." Her Perpetual Summer in a new revised
version was a winner of the Minnesota Orchestra's 2012 Composer
Institute competition.

Recent orchestral commissions include
Vessel for Metropolis Ensemble, commissioned by Meet the Composer for
their 2011 Three-City Dash Festival at Symphony Space in New York;
Elysium for the National Arts Centre's Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver,
Perpetual Summer for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada's 50th
Anniversary, Requiem Fragments for the CBC Radio Orchestra; Pearls for
the American Composers Orchestra, and By the Streams of Babylon for the
Albany Symphony Orchestra. Recent chamber music commissions include I
and Thou for the Chamber Ensemble of the Orchestra of St. Luke's (New
York), Immutable Dreams for the Da Capo Chamber Players (New York),
Division of Heaven and Earth for pianist Fredrik Ullén (Stockholm,
Sweden), Supernatural Love for Duo Concertante (St. John's,
Newfoundand), and As Biddeth Thy Tongue for saxophonist Timothy
McAllister.

Kati Agócs was Composer-in Residence with the
National Youth Orchestra of Canada for their Fiftieth Anniversary Season
in 2010, and with the Spartanburg Philharmonic Orchestra, through the
'Music Alive: New Partnerships' program of Meet the Composer and the
League of American Orchestras. The Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth
Blackbird toured across the U.S. with her quintet Immutable Dreams. More
than eight different ensembles have performed the work since its 2007
premiere, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New
York, Xanthos Ensemble in Boston, Lontano in London,U.K., and
Vancouver’s Standing Wave. Agócs was a Composer-in-Residence at the
Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in 2009, and performed as soprano
soloist in her own Awakening Galatea both there and on the New England
Conservatory's 'First Monday' series. She also sang in her own By the
Streams of Babylon, together with soprano Lisa Bielawa and the Boston
Modern Orchestra Project with Gil Rose conducting. Time Out New York
featured the premiere recording of Every Lover is a Warrior, on harpist
Bridget Kibbey's debut CD, Love is Come Again, as one of its top ten
recordings of 2007, describing the work as "a powerful, ruminative
suite" and Agócs as an "innovative" and "promising" composer.

Awards include the 2013 Composition Fellowship from the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, an inaugural 2009 Brother Thomas
Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a 2008 Charles Ives Fellowship
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the ASCAP Leonard
Bernstein Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center in 2007, multiple
commissioning grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, a Fulbright
Fellowship to the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Jacob K. Javits
Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, a New York Foundation
for the Arts Composition fellowship, a Jerome Foundation commission,
Presser Foundation Award, and honors from ASCAP in their Morton Gould
Young Composer Awards. Perpetual Summer was the runner-up for ASCAP's
Rudolph Nissim Prize for 2011, one of only two works selected by a jury
of conductors out of over 260 anonymously-submitted new orchestral
scores. (The work has since been revised, with the revised version yet
to be premiered). Fellowships and residencies include the Norfolk
Chamber Music Festival (Yale Summer School of Music), The Aspen Music
Festival, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Dartington International Music
Festival (U.K.), and the Virginia Arts Festival. She has written on
recent American music for Tempo, and wrote a candid inside glimpse into
the new-music scene in Hungary for The Musical Times in 2005. She had
previously spearheaded an exchange program between Juilliard and the
Liszt Academy in Budapest. As a result of these activities, the
progressive Vienna-based Hungarian publication Bécsi Napló credited her
with raising the visibility of Hungarian composers abroad.

Kati
Agócs earned the Doctor of Musical Arts and Masters degrees in
Composition from The Juilliard School, where her principal teacher was
Milton Babbitt. She is also an alumna of the Aspen Music School,
Tanglewood Music Festival, Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (one
of the United World Colleges, where she represented the province of
Ontario), and Sarah Lawrence College, all of which she attended on full
scholarship. From 2006 through 2008 she taught at the School of Music,
Memorial University of Newfoundland. She maintains a work studio in the
village of Flatrock, near St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.